Centrehealth Family Clinic

As a busy, local medical practice, Centrehealth Family Clinic was looking for a smarter way to tackle traditionally slow, paper-based methods of processing insurance medical information reports, which could sometimes take up to two months to process. The solution? A more secure, easy to use, paperless method that enables same day processing.

Background

Centrehealth Family Clinic is a local, Victorian’ based clinic with two practitioners, Two Practice Nurses and a number of support staff. A private billing practice, Centrehealth Family Clinic’s range of services include GP consultations, childhood immunisation, acupuncture, womens’ health checks and hypnotherapy for conditions such as smoking cessation.

“We’ve been using it for at least six months, and we just love it. It used to take us up to two months to process a medical report. Now, using the UHG widget integrated into MedicalDirector’s software, we can action it immediately - and process it the very same day.”

The Challenge

Since the inception of the practice in 1999, the Clinic has been using MedicalDirector’s Clinical solution. In 2000 the Centrehealth Family Clinic also integrated practice management software, Pracsoft. However, up until six months ago, it was still processing medical information reports via a traditional and often time-consuming paper-based process.

“We’re a medical centre, so our priority is seeing patients for medical needs, we don’t want to be spending too much time on repetitive or slow administrative tasks,” Practice Manager/Nurse, Catherine Hassall, said. “… we were still typing letters, and faxing them which was all just too slow and involved a lot of administrative handling time and cost.

“The request would be received at reception, it would get placed into the doctors in tray and left there until the doctor had time to get to it,” Cathy explained. “After the doctor prepared the medical report it would get handed to me, to bill. We would then wait for the payment, before we’d send the fax. Added up, it was so much handling, and there would be a lot of pit stops where it could get left on a bench or in a tray just waiting.”

“There’s no copious amount of paperwork. There’s no need to bother with postage or fax. And as far as visibility of requests, I’d say it is all very efficient. In fact, when we look back to how we used to process requests, we often say to ourselves that we can’t believe we used to do it that way!”

The Solution

In 2018, the Centrehealth Family Clinic discovered the benefits of going paperless, with a UHG widget integrated into MedicalDirector’s software, allowing the doctors to conveniently complete the insurance medical information reports while being able to access relevant patient clinical information from within their MedicalDirector Clinical management system.

As a result of implementing the new paperless processing system, not only has the Clinic saved more time, but also enjoyed a far more secure method of handling sensitive patient information.

“The great thing about using the UHG widget integrated with MedicalDirector’s software is that when we are dealing with confidential information, we have peace of mind that the report is created at the source, and then goes securely to the recipient.” Cathy says. “So it’s a lot more ‘direct’ and secure, compared to having patient information on a piece of paper sitting in one tray to the next.”

For anyone new to using an electronic method, Cathy highlights the integration of UHG with MedicalDirector is seamless, and using it together is very intuitive and easy to learn, especially when it comes to billing.

“As a practice manager, the UHG widget has made it so easy. All we have to do is have our practitioners open MedicalDirector, open the patient file, use the UHG widget as it directs and that’s it, you’re done,” she explained. “If the report is unfinished, the work done is saved until you log back into the widget and you can proceed from where you have left off.